What do you think is about that genre in particular that keeps drawing you back to it, particularly as a way of exploring women's lives and their experiences? Like you say, Evelyn wasn't really able to talk to her husband or her friends or her family about what she was going through and this is a really like interesting way of being able to explore women's lives that otherwise perhaps are kind of hidden away from from society.

Yeah.

As you say, my three novels have all focused on themes that really explore, I would say, feelings that women can have that they might be quite ashamed of.

And I think that idea of sort of shameful feelings plays a lot into it because these books are set in the 1930s, Sleeping Beauty's 1940s, and then The Model Patient is the 1960s.

The open conversations about mental health were not happening at that time.

So those feelings of shame about desire, sexual desire, or just wanting a different life, wanting control over your own life, those kinds of questions my female characters feel shame about having those desires.

And when those feelings become quite isolated and there isn't a way to express them and to express the rage that they might be bringing up, especially when so many of these feelings that women, the female characters in my book have, they have because of the patriarchal world they've lived in, the way that men have treated them in the early years of their life, all the expectations on them.

And in your first two films, books of course ballet plays such a massive role um and I was just wondering kind of how much of of you is I suppose put into that I know that you have experience as a ballet dancer um yourself and I was just wondering yeah why it was so important for you to kind of include those artistic creative material worlds in your creative world

Right.

Like, we all have this compulsion to repeat, but the problem that I found and that I write about in The Model Patient is that the patient is very vulnerable in this because of this thing called transference, where you end up transferring these past relationship patterns and emotions onto the therapist.

That gives them a position of great power, um, and they have to be very thoughtful about the way in which they employ that power, um, so that the patient can cope with all of this, all of these intense emotions, rather than get sort of dragged deeper and deeper into delusion.

And in The Model Patient, that is, is what happens.

Evelyn Westbrook, she, the, this ma- this main character, she goes to therapy hoping for help, but actually becomes deeply dependent and obsessed with her therapist, and he just takes her further and further into those obsessions rather than helping her separate out fantasy and reality.

Nope.

Um, the, the relationship dynamic for the therapist is so important.

But, but actually the, in, Evelyn, even though she has this very traumatic experience with the therapist, she does end up learning so much about herself as a result and making so much good progress in her life as a result.

The knowledge that you have the book deal, um, does that give you comfort? Is there also a pressure that while someone is actually waiting for this now, but you have the confidence that, well, someone believes in what you have to say?

Yeah.

It's, it's such a mix of the two.

It is a comfort knowing that, you know, you-- I, I've pitched the idea.

It's not like I'm just sitting there with a blank piece of paper being like, "Oh, I wonder what I'll write." You know, the, the idea, the synopsis has been approved, I suppose.

But, um, that...

So that's a, that is a comfort.

Um, w- what are the thought processes that lead you to write that synopsis? W- how are you deciding where it's going to be set? What questions are you asking yourself that let you know where it's starting, what the midpoint is, and how it might end?